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Workplace literacy practices constitute the basis of today’s increasingly textualised work life. Due to the legislation on trade secrets, less research has been conducted on literacy practices in the private sector. This interview study of reported literacy practices focused on the soft-ware, dictionaries and other technologies used in writing tasks in 11 different businesses in Finland. The informants (n=18) were Swedish-speaking Finns working in the Helsinki area and in Vaasa. The study showed that office software (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) is used for writing, as is email clients, chats and messaging systems. When encountering difficulties in writing, asking a colleague for help is a frequent strategy, together with searching the internet using Google. More established dictionaries, glossaries, and synonym web sites are also used, but to a lesser extent. The findings suggest implications for teaching at different levels: students could be trained in complex and multilingual text production, to efficiently use the widely used office software and to assess content in free dictionaries and on similar websites from a linguistic point of view.

In this article we present results from a case study of five business professionals and their workplace literacy practices and literacy events. The five interviewees are Swedish-speaking Finns, part of a 5 % minority in Finland, and they live both in the Helsinki capital area and in the Vaasa region. The business professionals work for two anonymized companies: Delta, a global business consultant company, and Zeta, a Scandinavian bank. Our theoretical framework is New literacy studies (Barton 2007/1994). All the interviewees use at least three languages at their work: their mother tongue Swedish, their second language Finnish (both are national languages in Finland), and English. High skills of both national languages are needed to perform the work tasks, and national languages are used more than English. The writing tasks are diverse and connected to the specialized work tasks of each employee, with the exception of e-mails that all interviewees write daily. The language choices are influenced by several factors, among them the language preferences of the recipient and the task at hand. Evidently, the companies have managed to make the best use of the language skills of the interviewees.